The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 168

Chapter 168: 168 | Nervous People Pay Attention

I opened it. Percy stood in the hallway wearing cargo shorts and a plain white t-shirt that hung loose on his lean frame, his navy blue hair catching the overhead fluorescent light in a way that made it look almost purple. His brown eyes were doing that thing they always did where they processed approximately eighteen variables simultaneously while his mouth struggled to select which one to verbalize first.

"Your mat is deployed."

"I saw."

"I considered the GO AWAY option but determined that first impressions with neighbors should establish baseline cordiality before introducing sarcasm." Percy paused. His left hand twitched toward the notebook visible in his cargo pocket. "Your room looks. Good. The desk placement is."

"Three inches to the left."

"I noticed. The lamp cord routing is cleaner at that position. Whoever made that call has opinions about cable management."

"You have no idea."

Percy stood in my doorway and did not enter. This was a Percy thing. He would stand at thresholds indefinitely until explicitly invited past them, not from shyness but from a genuine respect for boundaries that his brain categorized as load-bearing social infrastructure. Crossing without invitation would create a data conflict he didn’t want to process.

"Come in, Percy."

He stepped through the door with visible relief and immediately began cataloguing the apartment. His eyes moved in the specific pattern I’d seen in the furniture store, systematic sweeps that evaluated spatial relationships between objects. I watched him note the desk position, the reading chair angle, the distance between the bed and the bathroom door, the window sightlines. His lips moved slightly as he processed.

"Your layout optimizes for three primary functions." Percy’s voice had steadied now that spatial analysis gave him something concrete to anchor on. "Study at the desk. Rest in the bed area. Casual occupation in the living space. The reading chair creates an interstitial zone that allows transition between rest and study without committing to either. That is. Unusual. Most people commit to binary layouts."

"Diane planned it."

"Diane Fitzgerald. Your." Percy’s mouth worked around the word for a moment. "Guardian. Who runs Fitzgerald Media Group. Who represents. Several top-fifty Heroes."

"That’s the one."

Percy nodded once, a small sharp movement that suggested he was filing this information into a mental folder he’d already created and labelled sometime before arriving on campus. He drifted toward the window with the automatic pull of someone drawn to observation points, his reflection ghosting faintly across the glass as he looked down at the training grounds. From this angle I could see the notebook in his pocket more clearly, the corner of what looked like a hand-drawn map poking out the top, its edges covered in annotations so small I’d need binoculars to read them.

"I mapped the bathhouse this morning."

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